I woke up impossibly early this morning.
After trying, in that doomed way of insomniacs, to get back to sleep, in the end I gave up at about half past six.
By seven o’clock I was on my way over the fells with the dogs, who were astonished to be out in the world at such a peculiar hour, but grateful all the same, and they charged about and barked at everything.
I have not been walking for the past three days, and was quite astonished myself to see how much things have changed. The first of the spring flowers have made an appearance, celandines and marsh marigolds have sprinkled the fields with gold, and everywhere is suddenly green.
It was not a nice morning for a walk, being blustery with nasty squalls of stinging rain, but I was pleased to be there all the same, so soon after the new day had been made.
I am afraid that such an early start has taken its toll at this end of the day, because it is barely ten o’clock, but my eyes are refusing to stay open. My eyelids are sinking downwards like the barrier on a car park when you have neglected to organise the trip to the ticket machine, and I am not going to last for very much longer.
I had expected to find Mark busily engaged in laundry and fire-refilling activities on my return, but his snores were audible even as I opened the back door, so I left him to it and got on with the day by myself.
He slept and slept, whilst I tried to do the things that were not hoovering, although in the end they were starting to wear a bit thin, and I had just dragged the hoover bumpily up the stairs when he emerged.
It was far too late for coffee by then, so we had cups of tea in the conservatory, and I engaged myself in the manufacture of a Cat Lure out of some of the fingers of Mark’s old gloves.
There are several benefits to having a Cat Lure. Lucy has one for her cats. It is a feathery thing, with bells, on a string, tied to the end of a long stick, and inexplicably, whenever you get it out, her cats appear as if summoned by somebody rubbing a magic lamp. I do not understand this at all, because inevitably they are only ever being summoned in order to endure something ghastly, like several vomit-inducing hours in a cat basket in a moving car, you would think they would learn, but they don’t.
Another benefit is that it is a means of educating your cat to its true vocation, which is to hunt rats in Guffy’s case, not for nothing has she been named Guffy the Rodent Slayer. Not that she has slain anything much yet, apart from Mark’s bootlaces and Rosie’s tail. Still, she needs hunting practice for the fast approaching day when she is unleashed upon the compost heap.
I even sewed some bells on it.
Actually I was lucky to sew anything to it at all, because she killed it several times whilst it was in the manufacturing stages, but after that we reached the third benefit of having a Cat Lure, which is that they are more entertaining than the television, especially if you persist in watching nonsense like Bridgerton.
She killed it again and again and again until she was quite exhausted, we are expecting to have a very peaceful night tonight. In the end I tied it to one of the branches of the Swiss cheese plant in the conservatory, and she amused herself by bashing it repeatedly and then trying not to be in the way when it bounced back and bonked her on the nose.
We left her to it in the end and decamped to the shed to pull the van out into the fresh air to try and persuade it to dry out a bit, which it didn’t. We can’t do very much more to it now, because we have used up the last of the welding lenses on Elspeth’s minibus, and have got to wait until the new order arrives, which could be a week yet. Still, we measured up and calculated and swept and tidied everything up, until it didn’t look forlorn and sodden any more, but tidy and optimistic.
This will be a good thing to come back to.
We will start again after the weekend.
